My First Days Online

I've been online for almost 10 years. I can recall my first days on the Internet, when that irritating buzz of AOL's dial-up modem would tingle in my ears -- it was the only way I could communicate with my friends away from boarding school without running up an enormous long distance phone bill. I used AOL's e-mail, instant messenger, chat rooms, and knew nothing about web pages outside of what AOL's content had to offer. Not bad for an 18 year-old in 1995.

Always having a love of writing, I'm shocked that it's taken me this long to hop on the "blog-wagon". Maybe it's a fear of revealing too much about myself to total strangers. Perhaps it will be reminiscent of my days as a DJ at my high school's radio station, stuck behind a desk wondering, "Is anyone listening, and if so - how will I know, anyway?" Ah - the "comments" section. Maybe someone other than my family and friends will make comments and let me know who they are and why they're on my site, out of the billions of pages they could be surfing at this very moment.

Surprising that at age 18 I had no problem chatting with strangers online and talking to them about music, college and boys - and in person I'm not exactly an introvert - but now that I'm trying to write for a living, the words are the same but somehow the tone changes in my ears.